gds said:Quoted message said:And indeed, if you dig for comparative data, you'll find that cycling
is roughly 1% of the serious head injury problem. Riding in motor
vehicles is about 50% of the problem. Falling around your own home is
roughly 40% of the problem.
Frank is this the current data? If so can you provide the source?
I'd have to really dig for part of it, and I'm not where my reference
papers are. But here's what I recall.
The "50%, 40%" and a few other figures came from some head injury
website. It was in the form of a simple graph. I dug that out about
five years ago.
The "1%" (for bicyclists) came by putting together two sources. One
was a paper published as a chapter in a book on head injury - in fact,
I think the title was just "Head Injury." The chapter was an attempt
to get an accurate estimate of the number of HI injuries and fatalities
in the US. See, it turns out there is no official count, and estimates
vary widely. For example, the number of fatalities due to head injury
has been estimated at everything from about 50,000 to about 115,000.
The author of that paper compared about seven different sources,
examined their methods, and put his best estimate at 56,000 (IIRC). It
was toward the low end of the range.
That gives a number we can use with cyclist data. NHTSA gives reliable
counts of fatalties for motorists, motorcyclists, pedestrians and
bicyclists every year. The counts have been running about 750 or so
for the past few years. (Check their website, and search under
"pedalcyclists."😉
Now, one piece of propaganda that's frequently read is that "75% of
bicycle fatalities involve head injury!!!" (BTW, the figure is above
70% for pedestrians too, and I once saw data that claimed that was true
for _all_ accidental deaths.)
I've learned to be skeptical about such fear-mongering. If a cyclist
has his chest run over by a bus and also gets a scratch on his
forehead, that fatality "involves" a head injury. But still: If we
generously accept that figure, then there are 0.75 * 750 = 563 cyclist
fatlities due to head injury per year in the US, out of 56,000 total
head injury fatalities. That puts cycling at 1%.
In the end, the 50% and 40% are less important in my mind, which is why
I haven't bothered getting perfect details on them. The important
thing is, 99% of the head injury fatality problem has nothing to do
with cycling. Only 1% (probably less) is due to cycling.
If you like, I'll give complete citations for the Head Injury book and
its chapter on head injury epidemiology when I'm back at my files.
- Frank Krygowski
